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The primary measure of progress is working software.^[1] The ways we craft working software are changing rapidly. Handwriting code is becoming rarer and rarer. Systems of probabilistic programming are quickly taking the lead. It's early enough in this shift that I'm not sure what job titles the future holds.

I used to have strong preferences for languages, stacks, and frameworks. As I handwrite less and less code, my preferences are becoming less and less impactful. It's not that I don't still have them, it's that they aren't adding enough value to my current and future productivity.

We're in a period of hype outstripping the reality of sticking to the fundamentals we've relied on for years. Tests are more important than ever. Rapid feedback loops remain the fastest path to crafting true value for users and businesses. Someone is always shouting at you to switch to the latest and greatest shiny thing or your whole business won't survive the revolution. Your best path is to keep developing a deep understanding of the driving pains and problems you help alleviate, while remaining iteratively dedicated to improving the systems that guide the craft.

My current daily drivers:

• Cursor – I still want an IDE. I don't want vendor lock-in... the recent acquisition has me concerned, but I haven't carved out time to explore cline and non-IDE open source options.
• TDD – To various degrees of success, I set up my agentic development systems to follow TDD. Sometimes it works great! Sometimes the principles are violated and the benefits are lost, but my harnessing strategies are working more than they're not at the moment.
• IaC – Infrastructure as Code has become critical for me. DevOps was never my favorite activity, but IaC principles and agentic explanations are amplifying my ability to ship.
• Qodo – Agentic reviews from a team clearly using their own product is a great boon for my confidence in what I ship. This is by no means my only strategy, but it is one I use every day.
• Skills & staying in the loop – I find that turning my repetitive actions into agent skills and staying intimately involved throughout code generation is my fastest path to confidence in the code I'm shipping. I know that when I make the time and space to do some more experimentation I'll uncover more hands-off ways to get code confidently generated, but when I don't have the luxury of time and space, I'm finding active participation in "the loop" gets the best outcomes.

I'm currently delving:

Agentic TDD · Harnessing AI · What does the path from Junior to Senior look like now?

I enjoy using:

Agile practices, Testing Library, vitest, TypeScript (all aboard the strongly typed JS train 🚂), playwright, Tailwind CSS, React, Prisma ORM, Node.js, Remix, Express.js, MongoDB, JavaScript, CSS.

I have experience with:

Standard web tech → HTML, CSS, SASS/LESS/etc, Bootstrap
Frameworks/Stacks → Remix, Next.js, MERN, Django
JavaScript/TypeScript → Node.js, Express, React, Redux, Webpack, Backbone.js, jQuery
Testing → TDD, Vitest, Playwright, Jest, Mongoose, Sinon, React Testing Library
Datastores → MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL, BigQuery, SOQL (Salesforce)
DevOps → git(hub), fly.io, AWS, docker, vagrant, Terraform
Others → Python, Salesforce (Visualforce, Apex, Admin), C++, Java, PHP
Also → Agile, Scrum, Shapeup, Kanban, Kepner Tregoe Decision Analysis, Coda, JIRA, Shopify

Feel free to check out my github, pirate-matt. Most of my past work has not been public, so it's a little sparse, but it slowly gets a larger public footprint.

If you are wondering if I can do something, don't hesitate to reach out through email, or request a 15 minute virtual meeting.

The age of the builder:

It's still too early for me to definitively declare the decline in vertical specialization, but I'm seriously suspicious that smaller teams are succeeding beyond their previous boundaries. Alliteration aside, I'm finding that my skills gained in titles beyond Full-stack Software Developer—Product Manager, Business Analyst—are becoming more and more valuable to success. I suspect we're entering an age of "builders" where standard level software developers will be eclipsed by product and business minded folks amplified by agents.

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